In the city of Salto (Uruguay) on 10, 11 and 12 November 2013 the International Power Transformer Workshop organised by CUGRE (Comite Uruguayo De Grandes Redes Electrica), the Uruguayan CIGRE took place. Sea Marconi has been invited to the event as international expert on the phenomena of degradation of the insulating liquids, on the topic of corrosion in general and in particular on the type C3 oil corrosion (SDBP & corrosive sulfur), i. e. linked to the by-products of the degradation of sulfur.
Download the brochure of the event from the CUGRE site
On this topic, Sea Marconi developed, indeed for the Uruguayan UTE (a state company for the transmission of electricity) an ad-hoc expertise, offering a substantial contribution for the prevention and mitigation of damages on strategic equipment mainly in the field of generation and transportation of power. Critical factors surfaced relative to equipment over 20 years in operation, where the rate of failure is progressively increasing and this required the capability of developing an ad-hoc diagnostic coverage to identify specific countermeasures. Another criticality being underlined in the last few years, not only in Latin America, is the increment in the failure rate, (in the first year for a few types of equipment, up to 25 %) on new pieces of equipment produced by suppliers just appeared on the market characterised by low prices and low quality.
UTE was also supplied with the new kits SM-TCS (Total Corrosive Sulfur) together with the relevant training sessions, so that the Uruguayan technicians can perform a field or laboratory quantitative determination for cases C1 (Corrosion with DBDS), C2 (Corrosion without DBDS), C3 (Corrosion by degradation by-products of sulfur), C4 (Corrosion by dissolved metals without sulfur).
The workshop was organised not far from the Salto Grande hydroelectric power station, the largest in Uruguay, with an output of 1,890 MW. The Salto Grande power station, built in the 70? With a decisive Italian contribution (Impregilo constructions) is the first infra-structural project developed in South America by a by-national entity, with the participation of Uruguay and Argentina.
